Package alerting with Ascender Ledger Pro
Greg Sowell demonstrates the Packages section of Ascender Ledger Pro, which collects gather-facts, gather-services, and gather-packages output from any AWX derivative, including Ascender, AWX, Ansible Automation Platform, Tower, and Oracle's flavor, and makes it searchable. The example policy is that the telnet package must not appear on any new system.
The Current view lists every package on every host; filtering on telnet shows which servers have it along with version and release, and the results can be exported as CSV, PDF, or print. The Log view records every package added or removed, and adding a second filter on the add action isolates only new telnet installs. Saving that filter makes it reusable and also available to the Alerts section, where providers such as email or webhooks deliver notifications. A webhook can call an Ascender job to open a ticket and remediate, or hand the event to CIQ's event-driven automation.
Because Ledger Pro works from gathered facts, it detects the package whether it was installed by automation or manually. The demo suits teams enforcing package policy across a fleet.
Key takeaways
- Ledger Pro pulls package, service, and fact data from any AWX derivative, including Ascender, AWX, Ansible Automation Platform, Tower, and Oracle's version.
- Filtering the Packages Current view on telnet shows which hosts have it installed with version and release, exportable as CSV, PDF, or print.
- The Packages Log view tracks every add and remove, and a second filter on the add action isolates only new telnet installs.
- Saving a filter makes it available to Alerts, where providers can send email or fire webhooks to Ascender to launch remediation jobs.
- Because detection is based on gather-packages runs, a manual telnet install is caught just like one done through automation.
Questions this video answers
How can I get an alert when a specific package is installed on a server?
In Ascender Ledger Pro, go to Packages, open the Log view, filter on the package name and the add action, and save the filter. Then create an alert in the Alerts section that points at an email or webhook provider and references that saved filter. Any matching add event triggers the notification.
Does Ledger Pro detect packages that were installed manually rather than through automation?
Yes. Ledger Pro relies on gather-packages data collected from hosts on a schedule or whenever automation runs, so the next collection after a manual install reports the new package. That data hits the saved filter and fires the alert regardless of how the package got there.
Can a Ledger Pro alert trigger automation instead of just sending an email?
Yes. Alert providers include webhooks, so an alert can call Ascender or any AWX derivative to kick off a job. Greg describes a flow that opens a ticket, removes the offending package, and closes the ticket, or sends the event to CIQ's event-driven automation for further action.
About this video
It's often important to know when a specific package is added to a host, but how does one track this. Well, with Ledger Pro not only can you alert when a package is added, but you can also call an external system with webhooks to react! Oh, and by the way, it will detect and alert even if the package is manually added!
This video is part of the Ascender Pro playlist. Browse every CIQ video by product and topic.
Transcript
hey everybody I'm Greg Sowell and welcome to another ciq demo today I'm going to be talking about Ascender Ledger Pro and it's specifically its package section so where does it actually get all this information so uh Ledger Pro actually connects to any awx derivative so that's going to be awx itself our product Ascender which is Downstream from there or say AAP or Tower or oracles flavor and it's going to collect the logging information so these uh platforms like Ascender produce a tremendous I like to say it's a tsunami of information and it takes all that consumes it and makes it very usable
for you to do all kinds of interesting things and so in this specific instance we've got a corporate policy that says we shouldn't have the telet package installed on any new systems right they've got a chunk perhaps of systems that have telling that that's fine but I don't want to see it on any new things so what I can do is I can go to the packages section and current and I can see all of the available packages on every machine right because it's doing uh gather facts it's doing gather services and uh gather packages so it's pulling all that information in there anytime I
run piece of automation a little bit that'll be sent but I also have specific um jobs just scheduled to pull this information in now I want to filter it down a little bit so uh just for visualization purposes I'm going to click on the filter I'm going to go to packages in here I'm going to pick which package I'm interested in and that happens to be tnet I'll select it and I'll click add and then magically it will filter all that information down showing me just the servers that have that package installed but also the version and the release information now that I have all
this I can export all this information with the copy CSV PDF print options right so I can actually extract that and send it off to somebody else and utilize it but what if for example I wanted to see anytime the Tet package was added to something not only see it but I want to get an alert on it we can do that so over here in the packages section if I click on log you can see that I'm still uh filtering down to just the taet package right very convenient I'm going to go ahead and remove that just to show you all the options in
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here and it really shows you anytime any packages added or removed from the system so again I'm going to go packages Tet we're going to select that so it's going to narrow down to just that but beyond that I actually want to add an additional filter option of action so I just want to see when the tnet package is added and I'll click add and it you know it doesn't have any entries in there now but if one does pop up it would meet this criteria so what you do is you click create right here and I'll say Greg tnet filter and so now I've
got a filter in here in my list named Greg tet filter so anytime uh they any time I want to pop in here and find any messages where it's been added I can just quickly use that but whenever I create a filter I'm also creating matching for my alerting section over here so in alerts I have something called providers and this is where the alerts are going to go to so I could just do uh over to an email service right you can just get a nice email anytime the Tet package is added to a host but it also extends to anything you're going to
send an alert on as many people say email is dead I say it is alive and well uh and uh here we have it available but we also have the option to do web hooks right so if I want to send an alert out via a web hook I can send it to say my Ascender server or any awx derivative and I can kick off a job which is pretty cool so I can have the tell net package pop up and I can call a piece of automation to I don't know maybe add a ticket into the system and then go ah ahead and remediate
it so remove the package and then close set ticket I can do something like that or I can send it off to react which is our flavor of event driven automation to perform some automations there as well so in this instance I just want to set up a simple email alert so I'm going to say create a new alert I'm going to give it a name of Craig tnet alert why not enabled my provider remember where am I uh actually going to send that off to I'm going to do package alert right there and uh the filter specifically is in packages log you can see
it in Brackets there and Greg tnet filter and create so now that is put in place and anytime tnet gets added to a host I'm going to get a message the interesting part about this is tet doesn't necessarily have to be added via automation for me to see it so if somebody manually goes in there and adds the Tet package the next time that gather packages is run on that host it's sent off to uh my ledger Pro server here it's going to uh crunch through all that information it's going to hit this match right here and I'm going to get an alert so I'm
going to know whether it's happened via automation or manually so hopefully you can see this is a pretty useful option for troubleshooting various things inside your environments especially around packages and potentially alerting on them or even reacted to them if you have any questions or comments I would love to hear it if you'd love to see me do different demos on different things please reach out to us I enjoy that as well so if you are Keen to try out Ledger Pro which I hope you are please reach out to us as well and if nothing else happy uh ledgering Happy uh package managing happy
alerting on him and we'll see you next time bye
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